States rush to dump touch-screen voting systems

It's a good time to pick up an electronic voting machine on the cheap—provided you're not a stickler for things like "accuracy" or "security." States are scrapping tens of thousands of pricey touchscreen systems in response to mounting concerns about the machines' reliability.

After the butterfly ballot debacle of the 2000 presidential election, in which scores of elderly Floridians revealed a surprising fondness for Pat Buchanan, electronic voting was touted as the way to avoid any such fiasco in the future. Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which allocated some $3 billion in federal grants to help states upgrade their voting equipment—$2 billion of which had been spent by the end of 2007.

Now, however, many of those states—including Alaska, California, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Tennessee, and New Mexico—are ditching touchscreen kiosks with price tags as high as $5,000 each in favor of paper ballots. Ohio seems likely to follow suit once a legal battle with Premier Election Services, a voting machine manufacturer, is resolved. Though many of the transitions from touchscreen to paper are slated to take years to complete, already the proportion of voters served by touchscreens is expected to fall to 36 percent in November, down from a high of 44 percent in 2006. More voters are expected to use paper ballots in 2008 than did back in 2000.

Critics—including some of us at Ars—had long warned that electronic voting systems were not ready for prime time, citing concerns about their lack of transparency, vulnerability to tampering, and plain bugginess. Finally, states are increasingly coming to the same conclusion. Last year, Ohio produced a 1,000-page report cataloging a host of problems with the state's voting machines. Since then, a glitch blamed on conflicts with anti-virus software initially caused hundred of votes to be dropped as they were uploaded to tallying servers. A "top-to-bottom" review of California's voting systems last year found that hacker "red teams" were able to easily compromise machines made by Premier, Sequoia, Hart Intercivic, and Election Systems & Software—leading the state to decertify the machines.

In Florida, officials had hurried to upgrade voting technology after the embarrassment of 2000, spending tens of millions on new touchscreen kiosks—machines several counties are still paying off. Last year, in the wake of innumerable snafus, Gov. Charlie Crist announced the state would be scrapping more than 25,000 touchscreen machines. The bill for the transition back to paper could run as high as $35 million more. Perhaps just to rub salt into the wound, Sequoia offered to buy back the $5,000 boxes for $1 each. The state declined, passing the machines along to a recycling firm that will seek to resell the machines or strip them for parts.

Of course, finding a buyer for thousands of bulky machines that have been judged buggy and insecure may not be so easy. AP reports that some states have resorted to peddling the devices on sites like eBay or Craigslist, while others are hoping to unload them on developing nations.